He was not really a man of much personal ambition, unless of such personal ambition as consists in the desire to make the most brilliant use of one's intellectual gifts. The effort to govern the House of Commons through the King interested him, and called all his dearest faculties into play. He scorned the ordinary crafts of party management. If he thought a man stupid he let the man know it. He was rude and overbearing to his colleagues; insulting to people, however well recommended, who came to him to solicit office or pension. All that sort of thing he despised, and he bluntly said as much. "Ego et rex meus" was his motto, as we may say it was the motto of Wolsey. Not Wolsey himself made a more complete failure. The King fought hard for Carteret; but the stars in their courses were fighting harder against him. Carteret's term of office was familiarly known as "the drunken Administration." The nickname was doubtless due in part to Carteret's love of wine, which made him remarkable even in that day of wine-drinking statesmen. But the phrase had reference also to the intoxication of intellectual recklessness with which Carteret rushed at and rushed through his work. It was the intoxication of too confident and too self-conscious genius. Carteret was drunk with high spirits, and with the conviction that he could manage foreign affairs as nobody else could manage them. No doubt he knew far more about continental affairs than any of his English contemporaries; but he made the fatal mistake which other brilliant foreign {242} secretaries have made in their foreign policy: he took too little account of the English people and of prosaic public opinion at home. In happy intoxication of this kind he reeled and revelled along his political career like a man delighting in a wild ride after an exciting midnight orgy. He did not note the coming of the cold gray dawn, and of the day when his goings-on would become the wonder of respectable and commonplace observers. The cold gray dawn came, however, and the day. The public opinion of the country could not be kept from observing and pronouncing on the doings of Carteret. Carteret felt sure that he was safe in the favor and the support of the King. He did not remember that the return of every cold gray dawn was telling more and more against him. The King, who, with all his vagaries and brutalities, had a considerable fund of common-sense, was beginning to see that, much as he liked Carteret personally, the time was fast approaching when Carteret would have to be thrown overboard. The day when the King could rule without the House of Commons was gone. The day when the House of Commons could rule without the Sovereign had not come.